The God of Not War

Everything has got bitty recently which explains the lack of entries for this week. Big news here now is that Number One Son has Primary Dentition and is spending a lot of time trying to investigate them. Remember those long entries about brain state and relativity?

Listening to The Planets by Holst

How this man saw the trenches ten years or more before the existed is a great mystery. It always makes me think of him as a classical music version of the guy who sold his soul to the devil in order to be able to play his instrument well. Like Robert Johnson and others. That opening stutter of the Mars theme is just a musical interpretation of machine guns; you can see the jerky film of the Tommies going over the top, tripping over the barbed wire and being cut down. We are back into The idea of Michael Nyman music fitting any scene over which it is played. Change the muddy fields of Flanders to the blasted scrub of Southern Iraq or the steamy rain forests of Vietnam and it all still works. Vietnam one works extremely well for those pictures of the Napalm going off. All this makes war sound like a film which is of course, a very bad idea. War is missing faces and mashed guts and in some ways is like comedy with the laughter removed. Try the Benny Hill theme for those Tommies and the farce of what it achieved is probably better explained. What a stupid rant that was! I meant to be meaningful today. Oh good! Here's Venus - with the tea.

My daughter is now listening to Lesley Garrett during her going to sleep time. My daughter is now on first name terms with Lesley Garrett, Julie Andrews and The woman who plays Truly Scrumptious in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang which makes her sound like some stage school brat. I like to think she actually likes the music and dancing rather than the glitz and glamour but she is six after all.

Just got to Jupiter. When was at school we used to sing hymns every morning and I Vow To Thee My Country was the only one I really liked. I mean liked enough to get the tingly excited feeling that good music produces. I also like to think that Alexander Courage took inspiration from Jupiter for the Theme to Star Trek, which in tone and timbre is a direct rip-off of one part of Holst's stand-out track. While on the subject, is the Imperial March from Star-Wars nicked from the Montagues and Capulets (probably really called Dance of the Knights) by Prokofiev? We all know that the Cantina Band song is a chord-for-chord copy of You were made for me by Freddy and the Dreamers. Honest!